Sep 18, 2005

Hating Linux

Imagine a hypothetical scenario:

  • you install Ubuntu 5.04 from an installation CD
  • you install all upgrades
  • you ignore errors about not being able to connect to security.ubuntu.org or some such
  • you download sources to qemacs, because you want to compile it
  • compilation fails because X11 headers are not installed
  • you try to sudo apt-get install libx11-dev

It fails with a wierd error:

kjk@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libx11-dev: Depends: libx11-6 (= 6.8.2-10) but 6.8.2-10.1 is to be installed
              Depends: libxext-dev but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: libxi-dev but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: libxkbfile-dev but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

Now you scratch your head, poke around and try to figure out what the fuck is wrong. After 30 minutes it hits you: helpful upgrade process did upgrade all x libs from 6.8.2-10 to, I’m sure very significantly different, 6.8.2-10.1. But libx11-6 package was not upgraded and has a very strong dependecy on the exact 6.8.2-10 version and won’t buge.

So you spend another 30 minutes manually downgrading all x packages using clunky UI.

How can you not hate Linux?

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